- Opera of the Future
Jessie Mindel builds computational environments that let us connect with each other’s inner experiences. Many of the most intimate parts of ourselves, like the ways we process difficult experiences and form identities and values, are hard to access and share, but can be crucial assets in helping people better understand each other and themselves, especially at a time of division. Jessie's work focuses on mobilizing people to collaborate on creative projects which meaningfully integrate each collaborator’s core values, not only to support impactful creative outcomes, but to allow us to traverse each other’s inner worlds as a novel way to connect. To do so, she is building technologies that seek to use our meaning-making processes and the introspection and affect therein as resources for design. Generative tools that computationally model personal realizations, perspectives, and epistemologies will offer new ways to connect, create, and support well-being through each other’s meaning-making processes.
Jessie completed her Master's as an Amazon Robotics Day One Fellow in the Opera of the Future group at the MIT Media Lab. She is a researcher, engineer, designer, and storyteller by trade and by play. Starting in August 2024, she will be pursuing a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University. She completed her B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science with an emphasis on New Media and Design Innovation at UC Berkeley, and has worked as a software engineering intern at Meta and a human-centered product design consultant at Berkeley Innovation (in collaboration with Ford, Steelcase, SITELAB, and EHDD), where she built her background in human-computer interaction, robotics, digital fabrication, and audio. She cares deeply about developing supportive creative communities, and in designing creative technologies that leverage inner processes as interpersonal resources, she has continually worked to do so. Whether scaffolding emotionally intimate conversation through an AI-assisted world-building game, building tools and resources that aid in design students' metacognitive development, designing more community-oriented urban and learning spaces with architecture firms and retailers, writing speculative and self-subversive fiction about creative practice, or creating installations that make room for communities to discuss their values, Jessie is working to actualize more meaningful ways to understand each other and create through the transformative experiences that move us most profoundly.